GOAL! Meet the Latina behind the 2026 FIFA World Cup Houston poster

Lea esta historia en español.

Stephanie Leal recalls marveling at first sight of the Houston skyline when she was 8-years-old. Her family had spent most of the day on the road and after an eight hour-drive from her native city of Monterrey, México, they had arrived at their new home.

“I was asleep and we were passing by the downtown area,” Leal said. “My dad woke me up because he wanted me to see the skyline. It was nighttime and the lights were impressive. I saw them and wondered if I was still dreaming.” 

Leal, 29, turned that memory into inspiration for the design of a poster that now represents the city of Houston as a host city for the FIFA World Cup 2026. Her design, which she titled Dare to Dream, was announced as the official poster on March 26 after a contest that started in the fall of 2024.

Her design features an astronaut, Orion, clad in an orange space suit dribbling a soccer ball in a field. Orion is not only wearing a cowboy hat but a captain’s armband and throwing Houston’s famous “H” hand sign. 

Behind the astronaut is the city’s skyline, a tribute to Leal’s memory of her family’s arrival to their second home. 

“For me the skyline represents a lot. It represents opportunities and how dreams can become a reality in this city,” Leal said. “I’ve spent pretty much all my life in Houston, it’s my city where I developed my artistic style and my love for soccer.”

The upcoming World Cup will take place across North America with México, the United States, and Canada hosting games in various cities. Eleven cities, including Houston, are hosting games in the U.S. alone, three in México and two in Canada. Each city will feature a unique design both for a poster and a Sound ID, a version of the original FIFA theme song for this World Cup. 

Houston will host seven matches at NRG Stadium starting on June 14, 2026, and culminating in a Round of 16 match on July 4. 

Jon Schuller, vice president of marketing for the Harris County-Houston Sports Authority, helped oversee this contest. The city was given two options, Schuller said — to either propose artists to be invited to submit their vision to FIFA or hold a contest and open it up to the public. 

“With the world cup being such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, probably, for the city of Houston, we wanted to involve as much of the community as we could,” Schuller said. “We were very pleased with the reaction we got and the submissions that we got. And the final product we are ecstatic with.”

The first step, Schuller said, was to submit portfolios and a letter of interest stating what the poster means to the artist and what their vision is, but no design work was needed for this first round. Organizers received about 65 interested participants in this round and their job was to narrow it down to three finalists who would get paid $500 for their design work and an additional $5,000 if their design was chosen. 

“We were very cognizant of artists in their time and their efforts,” Schuller said. “So we sifted through the many entries submitted from throughout the greater Houston area and we settled on three artists to actually start producing work.” 

Leal was among those three finalists and said she immediately got to work on her draft. The day she found out, she was overjoyed, but knew there was little time to waste. Her first step was to create a playlist with all the World Cup songs she could think of for inspiration as she devoted most of her free time after her full-time job to this design. 

This was more than just a poster for her, Leal said. It was an opportunity to feature what she loves about Houston and her love for the sport.

All three finalists turned in several drafts along the way, Schuller said. He and his team would send these drafts to FIFA officials, who would in turn send back revisions. The whole process took about a month. 

“I am very fortunate that I can say I’m an artist, but I’m also a designer,” Leal said. “And I think that was a huge advantage for me in this because I combined both things.”

Leal graduated from the University of Houston in 2021 with a bachelor’s degree in graphic design and a minor in art history. But years before graduation, she had her sights set on fútbol. Her goal was to get a job with Houston’s professional soccer teams – the MLS’ Dynamo and the NWSL’s Dash. 

She recalls emailing the Dynamo’s creative director Bryan Salas and former creative director Juan Loya years before graduating to inquire into what she needed to be considered for a role there. They offered advice that she kept in mind until graduation. 

“They told me that they want somebody who can do a little bit of everything – design, photography, motion graphics, illustration – and I worked my ass for it,” she said. “I remember my family asking, ‘Where do you want to work?’ and I said, ‘Dynamo — that’s it’”. 

Leal joined the Dynamo team after graduation and worked as a designer there until 2024. Her departure from a full-time sports job was hard, she said, but she was never too far away from the sport itself. 

Leal grew up with soccer, or fútbol. Her favorite cartoon as a child growing up in México was Super Campeones, a Japanese anime based on a manga that was known as Captain Tsubasa in the U.S. As she grew older she went from paying attention to the anime, to the real players and sport legends. 

“I wanted to be like Oliver Atom, number 10,” Leal recalls laughing. “But it wasn’t until I came to Houston that I started to really watch fútbol. I learned about the legends, Ronaldinho (Gaúcho) and (Zinedine) Zidane, who you hear about but it’s not like I could see them play on TV (by then).”

And even though her parents were not huge fans, the rest of her family was, so she became a Tigres fanatic — the official team of the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León. She played cascaritas, street games, with the kids in her neighborhood, mostly boys, she recalls, and they would be mad at her for playing better than them. 

The many joyful memories surrounding fútbol informed her career aspirations as she sought ways to share that joy with the community. Her design paying tribute to both the sport and the city that offered so many opportunities to her and her family will soon be plastered all over the city as preparations for the 2026 World Cup kick off — a surreal thought for Leal.

“Los sueños se pueden hacer realidad en esta ciudad,” Leal said. “I’ve always dreamt of going to the World Cup. I never would have dreamt that I would be part of it.”